1 Introduction
Misperceptions that matter
“Sharon” works part-time as a school administrator in rural Virginia. She identifies as a Democrat, though admits she does not follow politics closely. When I interviewed her, Sharon talked to me about the issues most important to her. Near the top of her list was the national debt. In particular, she expressed concern over the “fact” that the United States owed most of its debt to China. “They could take our stuff, our natural resources,” Sharon told me. “They could demand that we give them stuff like that.” To Sharon, China’s majority ownership of U.S. debt posed a serious risk to national security: the threat of China “collecting” on its debt loomed much larger for her than concerns about healthcare or the environment.
Sharon is factually incorrect. Foreign entities own around a third of U.S. debt, and China owns just 8%. The majority of U.S. debt is owed to institutions within the United States, including U.S. citizens, mutual funds, and the Federal Reserve. But Sharon is far from alone in her misperception: about seven in ten Americans think that China owns the majority of U.S. debt, and many of them share Sharon’s concern that China will “collect” by repossessing American property.
The false belief that China owns most of the national debt is one of many misperceptions about U.S. policy that together form what I call the inventedstate. Others include the belief that undocumented immigrants are eligible for food stamps and that there are no federal limits on welfare benefits. These misperceptions have a common thread. They are false beliefs not about political actors (e.g., Barack Obama’s birthplace) nor about social and economic conditions (e.g.,
the unemployment rate), but rather about existing government policy. The concept of the “invented state” draws on Suzanne Mettler’s observation that much of what the government does is “submerged,” or invisible to ordinary citizens (Mettler 2011). This book makes two main claims: first, that this invisibility provides a fertile ground for misperceptions about existing government policy to flourish, and second, that correcting those misperceptions can profoundly change political attitudes.
While the precise contours of the invented state vary across individuals and across time, the factors that create it, including the media’s tendency to ignore existing policy and the human drive to construct inferences, are consistent. This book identifies some of the misperceptions that make up the invented state as well as offering an explanation of how policy misperceptions arise, why they shape attitudes, and how they can be corrected.
This chapter explains how the invented state fits into the ongoing conversation about the role of misperceptions in democratic functioning. I argue that false beliefs pose the greatest threat to citizen competence when they lead people to hold attitudes or behave differently than they would behave if fully informed, and misperceptions about existing policy are especially likely to distort opinions in this way.
Political knowledge and democratic functioning
When are misperceptions a problem?
In our ideal of a functioning democracy, citizens base their preferences on a relatively accurate understanding of the world around them, and then politicians respond to those preferences (Kuk linski et al. 2000).1 But this is a rather vague ideal, and translating it into measurable standards has generated a long and often contentious debate over exactly how much political knowledge is sufficient for effective democratic functioning (Fiorina 1981; Delli Car
pini and Keeter 1996; Lau and Redlawsk 2001; Kuklinski and Quirk 2 001). In response to this debate, Althaus (2006) suggests that holding citizens to an unreachably high standard of knowledge is not only impossible in practice but also reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of normative democratic theory: “For most of recorded history, the ignorance of ordinary people was therefore more of a ‘given’ than a ‘crisis’. . . The problem of an ill-informed citizenry is a counterfeit crisis born of misunderstanding” (Althaus 20 06, 91–96).
But if the answer to “how much do citizens need to know” is not simply “the more the better,” then what exactly is it? Lupia (2015) offers a path out of this conundrum by suggesting that the critical question is not how much citizens need to know, but rather how this knowledge directly affects their behavior. Citizens are competent if their knowledge allows them to make decisions in line with their underlying preferences (Mansbridge 1983). Looking at knowledge through the lens of competence means that not all misperceptions (or ignorance) are inherently a threat to democratic functioning (Lupia et al. 1998). A person, or even wide swaths of the public, can be uninformed or misinformed without it affecting their competence.
For example, about 20% of Americans believe that Barack Obama was born outside of the United States. This widely held misperception persisted even after Obama’s long-form birth certificate offered definitive proof that he was born in Hawaii (Berins ky 2023). This is on its face startling: millions of Americans believe something that is deeply false, even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary. But the framework of competence pushes us to consider not just the magnitude of a misperception but also whether it distorts attitudes. And there is little evidence that believing Obama was born outside the U.S. led people to change their attitudes. Rather, the choice to believe the “birther” conspiracy is a direct product of those attitudes, including racism, dislike of Obama, and conservatism (Pasek, Stark, et al. 2015). The misperception, while troubling for a range of reasons, may not
actually be a substantial threat to the competence of those who hold it.2
In this book, I argue that we should focus on the misperceptions that pose a direct threat to competence. Applying this standard could change how academics and journalists go about designing and implementing interventions to correct misperceptions. Currently, both academic and public attention tends to focus on the misperceptions that are the most novel, appalling, or divisive. Frequently, this category includes those that are sharply divided along partisan lines (e.g., false beliefs about Obama’s birthplace).
However, when we see that a particular misperception is strongly associated with partisanship, this association should raise a red flag about its potential causal impact on attitudes. If Democrats are the only ones who falsely believe that the economy tanked during the first two years of Trump’s presidency, then perhaps their partisan identity is the underlying cause of both their dislike of Trump and their false belief, rather than the false belief causing the dislike. The following section outlines the role of partisanship in shaping factual beliefs (and misperceptions), and explores why some types of factual beliefs may be less subject to partisan bias than others.
How partisanship shapes beliefs
People learn about the political world from a range of sources, including their experiences, the media, and their social interactions. Then, they draw on this knowledge to inform their attitudes. Partisanship complicates the relationship between facts and opinions in several ways.
Across a range of issues, Democrats and Republicans hold markedly divergent sets of factual beliefs. They offer different estimates of the COVID mortality rate (Robbett and Matthews 2020), hold different sets of beliefs around healthcare policy (Berinsky 201 7), and perceive the economy differently (Prior et al. 2015). The media have devoted a great deal of attention to these differences, often featuring alarmist headlines like the Economist’s 2016 cover
story “The Post-Truth World” (Economist 2016). Indeed, in 2016, the OxfordEnglishDictionary named “post-truth” its “word of the year,” citing the increasing power of emotional partisan attachment to shape factual beliefs (Keane 2016).
While partisanship is undeniably a powerful force in creating our understanding of the political world, treating people’s beliefs as only a product of partisan identity is as reductive and misleading as treating them as purely a product of objective rationality. Achen and Bartels (2017, 296) succinctly describe the average citizen’s factual beliefs as “constructed mostly of folk wisdom and partisan surmise, with a trace element of reality.” Much of the recent literature on information (and misinformation) has focused on the role of “partisan surmise,” but much less attention has been paid to understanding how the relative amounts of “folk wisdom” and “reality” change depending on the person, the issue, and even the type of factual belief.
The extent to which partisanship shapes beliefs varies by person (with strong partisans generally relying more heavily on partisan cues) and by issue (with more “politicized” issues being more subject to partisan distortion). Stronger partisans are both more able to access partisan cues and more likely to construct beliefs in a way that protects their partisan identity (Lodge and Taber 2013). Arcenea ux and Vander Wielen (2017) also posit that the extent to which individuals allow partisanship to color their attitudes and beliefs is partly a function of their underlying personality traits.
In addition, not all issues are equally tied to partisan identity. Empirically, this means that factual beliefs about highly politicized issues may diverge along party lines more than factual beliefs about less politicized issues. Partisan heuristics are more available for some issues than for others and are especially salient when issues have become highly politicized (Dowling et al. 2020; Nyhan and Reifler 20 10).
Finally, the extent to which partisanship shapes a particular factual belief may depend on the nature of the fact, including its level of abstraction. Many studies measuring partisan bias in factual perceptions focus on “performance” indicators and ask participants
to estimate seemingly objective quantities like the unemployment rate. For example, Achen and Bartels (2006) calculate the relative impact of partisanship versus “objective reality” in shaping beliefs about a range of dynamic economic indicators like the budget deficit and inflation. Similarly, Bartels (2002) examines the impact of partisanship on ten different factual beliefs, each of which have an explicit temporal dimension (e.g., participants are asked to estimate whether unemployment has risen or fallen, whether spending on public schools has increased or decreased, and whether inflation has gone up or down). Across these and many other studies asking about performance measures (Evans and Andersen 2006; Prior et al. 2015; Tilley and Hobolt 2011; Evans and Pickup 2010), partisanship strongly shapes participants’ estimates.
All of these measures assess how well citizens understand the outcomes of policies rather than the policies themselves. There are good reasons to believe that outcome beliefs are important. Evaluating outcomes is cognitively easier than evaluating the complex policies that led to those outcomes, making these outcome beliefs the foundation for retrospective voting (Healy and Malhotra 2 013). However, outcome measures are particularly sensitive to partisan bias because their time-sensitive aspect cues people to take into consideration the party in power (Gerber and Huber 2010). Precisely because they are measures of performance, they are implicit referendums on the current government (indeed, this is what makes them so valuable for retrospective voting), and so respondents automatically assess them through a partisan lens (Bisg aard 2019).
Beliefs about performance are only one aspect of political knowledge that shapes competence (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). People also hold factual beliefs about who falls into different tax brackets and who is in charge of collecting their garbage—in other words, beliefs about what policy actually does rather than about its outcomes. There are several reasons why partisanship may have a smaller effect on shaping beliefs about existing policy compared to beliefs about policy outcomes. First, the “party in power” heuristic is less relevant when understanding or evaluating long-standing
policies (e.g. Social Security). Second, because news coverage of politics is biased toward novelty and change (Patterson 2013), people may have fewer opportunities to learn where their party stands on a policy not currently in the news. Of course, facts about current policy are not entirely immune to partisan inference (Udana 2018). Still, while Achen and Bartels (2017) are inarguably correct that “partisan surmise” plays a large (and potentially growing) role in factual perceptions (and misperceptions), there are a wide range of issues for which partisanship is not particularly useful as a heuristic for belief formation.
What kinds of false beliefs threaten competence?
Beliefs, both true and false, affect how and when citizens exercise political power to help create a world aligned with their values and preferences. One way for people to exercise this power is through voting, but factual beliefs shape the political world in other, more subtle ways as well. What people know (or think they know) about politics affects how they discuss politics with their friends, what stories they click on in their Facebook feed, and whether they choose to vote in the first place—and all of these in turn shape both who is elected and what policies they enact (Southwell et al. 2018; K uklinski et al. 2001; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996).
Discussions of information effects in politics sometimes implicitly assume that the opposite of knowledge is ignorance. However, misperceptions may pose a much greater threat to citizen competence and thus to democratic functioning: holding false beliefs “can lead to collective preferences that differ significantly from those that would exist if people were adequately informed” (Kuklinski et al. 2000, 792). Consider Citizen X, a strongly anti-abortion voter. Citizen X must choose between Candidate A and Candidate B but does not know the two candidates’ stances on abortion. Citizen X’s ignorance might affect her actions in several ways. She might seek out information on the candidates’ positions, decide to rely on the two candidates’ partisan affiliations as a shortcut, or abstain from voting altogether. Her ignorance will also affect what she does notdo. She
will likely not tell her friends about the candidates’ stances on abortion (since she does not know what those stances are) or write an angry letter about them to the local paper. If she does choose to vote, she will not explicitly base her vote on the candidates’ position on abortion.
Now, consider Citizen Y. Citizen Y is also strongly anti-abortion, but unlike Citizen X, Citizen Y holds a misperception about the one of the candidates. Specifically, he incorrectly believes that Candidate A is pro-choice, when in reality Candidate A is strongly pro-life. Citizen Y is unlikely to seek out additional information about candidates’ positions on the issue because he believes that he already has this information. His misperception might shape his preferences, making him more likely to cast a vote for Candidate B over Candidate A. It might also shape his behavior; increasing the likelihood he discusses the issue with friends, thereby potentially spreading the misinformation to more people (Weeks and Garrett 2014). When misperceptions inform people’s attitudes and behavior, it can compromise both citizen competence and democratic responsiveness.
Because voting is the primary way that citizens translate their preferences into political outcomes, misperceptions about candidates (as in the previous example) intuitively feel like a major threat to voter competence. We worry that false beliefs about candidates will lead voters to act in a way that runs counter to their own selfinterest. Many of us have felt the frustration of trying to convince someone that the so-called factual belief they hold about a political candidate is wrong. These arguments tend to be over high-profile factual disputes that break down along partisan lines, with Democrats and Republicans fervently defending their versions of the truth, from whether George Bush orchestrated the September 11 attacks (he did not) and whether Sarah Palin banned books in the Wasilla library (she did not) to whether Barack Obama was born in the United States (he was) and whether Hillary Clinton had a terminal illness (she did not). These highly partisan misperceptions also took center stage in the 2016 election, when “fake news”
stories on Facebook spread misinformation about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (Silverman 2016; Alcott and Gentzkow 2017).
Is this intuition justified? Do misperceptions about candidates lead people to vote in ways that run counter to their interests? Substantial academic research suggests that while this outcome is possible, it is surprisingly rare. Instead of shaping attitudes, these highly politicized misperceptions are largely the product of attitudes —namely, partisan identity. Democrats and Republicans seek out and believe information that reinforces their existing opinions, even when that information is unsupported by fact (Flynn et al. 2017; Swire et a l. 2017). For the most part, these candidate-centered misperceptions emerge from explicit misinformation (Berinsky 2023; Weeks and Sou thwell 2010) and are extremely difficult to correct (Garrett and Weeks 2013; Nyhan and Reifler 2010) because they are deeply intertwined with partisan identity. Thus, rather than leading people to vote contrary to their interest, candidate misperceptions tend to be direct expressions of that interest. While candidate misperceptions feel intuitively problematic (and viscerally annoying), a greater normative threat may come from a type of misperception that has received far less attention but is extraordinarily common: false beliefs about policy.
How policy misperceptions threaten competence
In Chapter 2, I use interviews to elicit factual beliefs about politics. A common thread in these interviews, confirmed across several representative surveys, is that misperceptions about existing policy, from Social Security to welfare to taxes, are surprisingly widespread. This finding forms the foundation for the rest of the book, which outlines both how these false beliefs emerge and the effects of correcting them.
Survey questions that measure factual beliefs about existing policy, which I refer to throughout the book as “policy-current” questions, are relatively rare. For example, between 2000 and 2013, policy-current questions comprised just 12% of the political knowledge items on the American National Election Survey. Most of
the questions were about civics-related topics (e.g., the number of justices on the Supreme Court or the length of a president’s term) (B arabas et al. 2014). Civics questions are asked more frequently on surveys for good reason: this type of knowledge is highly predictive of normatively desirable behaviors, including several forms of political participation (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996).
While civics knowledge is associated with participation, it may be less directly relevant to the question of citizen competence (Gilens 2 001, Lupia 2006). In contrast, policy knowledge directly affects citizens’ ability to connect their values to specific policy outcomes (Al varez and Brehm 2002; Gilens 2001). Misperceptions about existing policy can impede citizen competence by altering priorities, impeding debate, and distorting preferences.
The government operates via inputs (in the form of tax dollars) and outputs (policies and laws). Democratic accountability requires that citizens be able to evaluate these inputs and outputs and hold legislators responsible for them. Elections are referendums not only on candidates but also on the policies that they have enacted or propose to change. But debates over what the government should do are meaningless unless voters have a shared belief about what the government is doing. Widely held misperceptions about policy threaten citizens’ ability to hold their elected officials accountable and prioritize their desired policy outcomes (Hochschild and Einstein 2015). For example, Sharon’s belief that China owned the national debt led her to prioritize that issue over others that mattered to her. Citizen attention is limited (Baumgartner and Jones 2010), and false beliefs can direct attention away from some issues and toward others. Indeed, politicians can strategically use misinformation to influence the public’s priorities: for example, during the 2016 election, Donald Trump falsely stated that the murder rate was the highest it had been in 47 years (Jacobson 2017). Concern about crime in the U.S. rose to a 15-year high in 2016 (Davis 2016), with eight in ten Trump voters describing crime as a “very serious problem” (Francovic 2016).
Misperceptions also hinder political debate, both at the elite and interpersonal levels. In many political debates, people have shared
goals (e.g., lower crime rates) but disagree over what policies can best help reach those goals. A shared understanding of the policy that currently exists is a critical foundation for productive deliberation. Most existing policies are a direct product of at least some political compromise. Therefore, they will often be more palatable to both sides than any novel policy proposed by either side, and can thus be a useful baseline for evaluating new ideas (Fis hkin 2011; Flynn et al. 2017). To give a concrete example, if someone incorrectly believes that the U.S. does not check refugees’ backgrounds before admitting them, then they may find any refugee policy reform that does not include background checks unacceptable —even though in reality, background checks have long been required for refugees.
Finally, the invented state may distort preferences, leading people to hold policy preferences that are different than they would hold if they were fully informed. Preference distortion is a common concern raised about the effects of political misinformation. For example, we might worry that someone who believed a false rumor that a candidate embezzled funds was less likely to vote for her, or someone who incorrectly thought that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) includes death panels was less likely to support it. Of course, both examples involve an explicit choice between two different potential outcomes: Candidate A versus Candidate B being elected, or the ACA passing versus failing. However, misperceptions can also reduce support for existing policy (e.g., the false belief that SNAP benefits are available to undocumented immigrants might lower a person’s support for the program). Indeed, in Chapter 6 I show correcting common misperceptions increases support for existing policy across five different issue areas.
The creation of the invented state
Where do policy misperceptions come from? Some are attributable to explicit misinformation. For example, many Americans came to believe that the 2010 Affordable Care Act contained “death panels”
that would result in seriously ill people being denied necessary medical treatment—a false belief based on misleading statements from conservative pundits (Nyhan 2010). However, exposure to misinformation is not the only source of misperceptions. Many false beliefs arise not because people are exposed to “fake news” or politicians’ lies, but because they lack the necessary information to make sense of a complicated political world, and their efforts to “fill in the blank” lead them to incorrect conclusions. The increasingly fragmented media environment exacerbates this situation; not only because misinformation can spread more easily (Kim and Kim 2019) but also because a surfeit of options can make it difficult for citizens to find the information they need to fully understand an issue (Benn ett 1996b; Bradburn 2016).
Fundamentally, people come to hold misperceptions in much the same ways that they come to hold any factual belief about politics: they cobble together “pictures in their heads” based on personal experience, media coverage, and their assumptions and beliefs (Lipp mann 1922). Most of what we know about politics, both correct and incorrect, comes not from direct, lived experience but through intermediaries. Civics textbooks inform us how the government works. The media tell us which issues matter and why. Politicians explain how our tax dollars were spent. We combine this (often incomplete and sometimes inaccurate) information with our experiences (and, of course, our own biases) to construct a set of beliefs about reality that may correspond only inexactly to the facts on the ground. Walter Lippmann, writing almost a century ago, warned that this mental process could lead us deeply astray:
The casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a counterfeit of reality to which there was a violent instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond . . . By fictions I do not mean lies. I mean a representation of the environment which is in lesser or greater degree made by man himself. (Lippmann 1922)
Lippmann describes three factors that, together, can create a compelling political “fiction.” First, the “casual fact”: the information a person has encountered about a given issue. When a person learns about an issue, it is usually not through a systematic and careful review, but rather through fragmented headlines and articles that often lack critical context and background information (Bennett 1996b; Jerit 2009). What is notsaid can be as important as what is said in creating misperceptions, especially given the relative dearth of substantive policy content compared to coverage of candidate strategy and other “horse race” stories (Faris et al. 2017). Even when the campaign season is over, media attention rarely turns to matters of established public policy, largely becauseit is established: there is little that is novel and thus deemed worthy of news coverage. As Mettler points out, the “policies of the submerged state have not been the subject of sustained and extensive partisan elite debate . . . The lack of much overt controversy over such policies discourages coverage by the news media, which largely follows elite cues and is drawn to dramatic conflict” (Mettler 2011, 54). One of the consequences of this lack of coverage is, as we might expect, ignorance—and indeed, Mettler finds that many citizens are substantially ignorant about much of what the U.S. government does. But this lack of coverage also creates a fertile ground for misperceptions.
The second factor, what Lippmann calls the “creative imagination,” speaks to the inherent human drive to draw inferences from even the smallest piece of information. The mind is “a machine for jumping to conclusions” (Kahneman 2011), but the existence of systematic cognitive biases means that the conclusions that it jumps to are often very wrong (Wyer and Albarracın 2005). When trying to comprehend the issue of the national debt, for example, a person might automatically (and even unconsciously) employ a familiar metaphor: personal debt. Personal debt is usually owed to external companies like banks or credit card companies: entities that, if unpaid, will come to collect. But drawing these parallels with the national debt leads to erroneous inferences about to whom the national debt is owed and the consequences of a failure to pay.
The third factor answers the question of why Americans remain ignorant about some issues but form misperceptions about others. There are hundreds of issues that the media do not cover and about which the public knows little, from Argentinian trade agreements to licensing requirements for zookeepers. But most Americans probably do not hold false beliefs about exactly how much training a zookeeper needs before she is legally allowed to throw a fish to a seal. Why does a person form misperceptions around some issues but not others? I argue that the catalyst for the creation of misperceptions is what Lippmann called the “will to believe” —the desire to understand the issue at hand. Only when a person believes an issue to be important will they engage in the cognitive work necessary to form beliefs (either accurate or inaccurate) about it. Someone might come to believe an issue is important for a wide range of reasons, including self-interest, values, elite discourse, or even simply being asked a survey question. Regardless of the reason, people are more likely to spend time thinking (or, as social scientists call it, “engaging in cognitive elaboration”) about issues that they deem to be important, and engaging in this cognitive elaboration increases the likelihood that they will, in Lippmann’s words, “create the very fictions to which they respond.” The “will to believe” is thus the final and necessary component for the creation of the invented state.
The invented state is problematic, and yet it also offers reasons for optimism about citizen competence and participation. The misperceptions that make up the invented state are largely created from citizens’ struggle to understand issues that they believe are important. Insofar as we value citizens grappling with political issues, the existence of the invented state means that they are doing just that. Misperceptions may be more dangerous than ignorance in many ways, but they also demonstrate effort rather than apathy.
2
The contours of the invented state
Chapter 1 introduced the concept of the “invented state”: widespread misperceptions about public policy that could impede democratic functioning. This chapter uses a bottom-up approach to measure factual beliefs, with the goal of identifying commonly held misperceptions about existing policy.
The origins of misperceptions
When it comes to politics, just about everyone is wrong about something. You may not believe that former President Barack Obama is secretly Muslim, but perhaps you mistakenly think that judges in your town are elected, not appointed, or that crime rates in your state are much higher than they really are. All of these are political misperceptions, but they likely differ along several important dimensions, including how you came to hold them in the first place and the extent to which they are tied to your partisan identity. This section outlines some of the ways that misperceptions arise and argues that the varied origins of political misperceptions make them uniquely difficult to identify with survey research alone.
Explicit misinformation
Sometimes people come to hold misperceptions because they were exposed to misinformation. In 2009, 41% of Americans believed that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) included so-called death panels that would prevent the sick and elderly people from receiving necessary
healthcare (CNN/ORC 2009). Brendan Nyhan (2010) shows that this misperception arose after a false claim by conservative pundit Betsy McCaughey was amplified and repeated by the media. Similarly, exposure to the type of “fake news” stories that spread during the 2016 election can also create misperceptions (Silverman 2016), although of course not everyone exposed to a piece of misinformation will believe it (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017).
Misperceptions that are directly caused by exposure to misinformation are relatively straightforward to identify, partly because there is a growing industry explicitly devoted to identifying false claims in elite political discourse. Fact-checking organizations routinely scan politicians’ statements and campaign advertisements to identify misinformation, and many also tackle rumors that spread via emails and social media (Graves 2016; Amazeen 2016). The mission statement of the popular fact-checking website PolitiFact describes their mission as checking the claims of “elected officials, candidates, leaders of political parties, advocacy groups, political action committees, pundits, columnists, widely circulated chain emails, bloggers, political analysts, the hosts and guests of talk shows, and other members of the media” (Politifact 2017).
By asking survey questions about these false claims, researchers can attempt to measure the extent to which misinformation in the media has shaped the public’s beliefs. But this approach paints an incomplete picture of the total universe of public misperceptions because fact-checking organizations focus almost entirely on finding and correcting misinformation (false information) rather than misperceptions (false beliefs) (Wilner 2016). And while some misperceptions do originate from exposure to misinformation, others stem from another source: individuals’ unsuccessful (and often biased) attempts to make sense of an often-confusing political world.
Biased processing
In politics as in other areas, individuals’ cognitive biases can lead them to make incorrect inferences about the world around them (Arc
eneaux 2012; Lau and Redlawsk 2001). Partisanship is a major cause of biased processing in the political world (Lodge and Taber 20 13). As discussed in Chapter 1, many factual misperceptions are directly attributable to reliance on partisan heuristics. Factual questions that reflect on the party in power are especially susceptible to partisan influence: for example, Democrats are more likely to overestimate the unemployment rate when a Republican is in the White House (Achen and Bartels 2017).
However, not all biases are partisan in nature. About 15% of Americans believe over half of all U.S. spending goes to foreign aid (DiJulio and Brodie 2016), even though foreign aid makes up less than 1% of the budget. This misperception is driven partly by the availability heuristic: when estimating the size of a category, people tend to overestimate the size of categories that are vivid and easily accessible (Kahneman 2011), and foreign aid is more memorable than (for example) tax breaks for homeowners. Thus, while the misperception is created through biased processing, the bias is not partisan in nature: indeed, Democrats and Republicans are equally likely to incorrectly overestimate the amount spent on foreign aid (C BS News 2011). Chapter 4 discusses in more detail how cognitive biases contribute to the creation of misperceptions.
Biases (either partisan or not) can be exacerbated by the information environment. To return to the foreign aid example, most politicians may stop short of explicitly lying about the percent of the budget that goes to foreign aid, but many implicitly argue that the amount is too large. For example, in 2017, White House Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney argued that cuts in foreign aid would enable a $54 billion expansion of the military budget. “The overriding message is fairly straightforward: less money spent overseas means more money spent here,” said Mulvaney (Shepardson 2017). In reality, the international aid budget at that time was only around $34 million (OECD 2016), so even cutting the entire amount would have been insufficient to fund the proposed expansion.
Such “implied” misinformation is rarely noted by fact-checking organizations but can have real effects on beliefs (Rich and Zaragoza
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“No business for any one to be there,” said Porky, listening intently. “We are well on our side yet.”
“It’s over there on that little hillock,” said Beany positively, “and I think they are whispering in German.”
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“I can’t help it,” said Beany. “They are whispering in German.”
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They did not stand up again, but slowly and with the greatest caution approached a small hillock that stood slightly away from the steeper hills. It was not wooded enough to afford any shelter, nor was it high enough to be a good spot for a gun. For that or for some other reason, the enemy had failed to shell it.
On the side toward the Allies a pile of high boulders was tumbled. The rest was grass grown. Beany, whispering softly in his brother’s ear, insisted that the voices came from this place.
“Then they are underground,” whispered Porky in his turn.
Slowly, ever so slowly they crept up to the little hill and lay in the darkness, listening. Certainly through the grass and stones of the mound came the muffled sound of cautious voices. If they had been speaking English, it is probable that even Beany’s wizard ears would not have caught the sound. But the harsh guttural German, even when whispered, seemed to carry far.
“I don’t see how you heard ’em,” breathed Porky. “It’s hard enough to believe now. What do you suppose it all means?”
“Search me!” Beany breathed in return.
“What they doing over on our side?” wondered Porky.
“It’s a good place all right,” said Beany against his brother’s ear as they lay close to the grass.
They were silent for a while, when the unbelievable happened. It was so amazing, so stunning, that both boys at first could not believe that they heard aright. They heard a sound like a windlass or crank
turning, a few clods tumbled down on them, and a voice once more whispered hoarsely three words:
“Gee, it’s hot!”
“Gee, it’s hot!” said the German voice and the simple words seemed to the astounded boys to ring across the valley! On the contrary, they were spoken in a low whisper.
Another voice replied. “He won’t like it if you speak English, you know.”
“I can’t help it,” said the first speaker. “We are two to one anyhow, and I am tired of talking that lingo. I’m a good German all right, but I wasn’t brought up to speak German and it comes hard. And this is the hottest place I ever did get in. I don’t like it. Do you know what will happen about to-morrow? I’ll tell you. We will find ourselves miles behind the Allies’ lines, and then what do you propose to do, Peter?”
“Bosh!” said the man called Peter. “You think because a handful of Americans are here that the tide has turned. Be careful what you think. I tell you no. What can a few hundred of these fellows do against the perfect, trained millions of the Fatherland?”
“You don’t know them,” said Fritz.
“Yes, I do,” said the man Peter. “Now let me tell you. For years I was in England; sent there to study those foolish bull-headed people and to create all the unrest I could. It was so easy. I saw these Americans there, crazy, loud-mouthed, boasting, always boasting. They talked fight, they told wild tales about the bad men of their west, always boasting. So I tried them. I am a big man, Fritz, and strong; I was not afraid of a little fight, me, myself. I tried them. I slurred their government, sneered at their president, laughed at their institutions. What think you? They laughed. They laughed! Quite as if I said the most kindly things. I said, ‘What I say is true, is it not?’ and they said, ‘Perhaps, but it is so funny!’ That is what they said, ‘so funny!’ They should have slain me where I stood.”
“They don’t care what you say or what the rest of the world says,” whispered Fritz. “They are too big. Their country is too big. When they fight.... Wait until you have seen them fight! They fight with grunts and gasps and bared teeth. They do not need trenches, they
will go over the top with a shout. You will see, friend Peter They are back there in the darkness now. I feel them!”
“A few of them, only a few,” said Peter. “This little castle of sod and stone is getting on your nerves, my friend. Look you! Do you think the Highest would deceive us? Never, never! There is nothing to this talk of the Americans coming over here. To be sure, they have declared war, but what of it? They are no good. They have no army. All their boasted possessions, all their harbors, all their wealth, yet they have no army. No army! That shows how inefficient they are. Never fear, my Fritz. Not a hundred thousand will reach this soil. I have it from our commanding officer himself.”
“Then here’s hoping for a quick release from this hole,” said Fritz bitterly.
“To-morrow,” said Peter; “to-morrow our hosts will sweep across this valley, and we will be with our own again.”
“Oh, I hope for some release. It’s the hardest duty I have ever been given.”
“But think how we have been able to guide our guns, talking as we can to the airplanes through the clever arrangement of our three little trees on top of our delightful little hill.” He laughed. “How clever it all is! And no one will ever suspect!” He paused again to chuckle, and Porky quite suddenly shoved a sharp elbow into Beany’s ribs.
“Well, I’m sick of it,” said Fritz still in his low, hoarse whisper, and seemed to move away from the side of the hill where he had been standing.
The boys with the greatest caution wriggled away.
“Now what do you think of that?” said Porky when they were in a position where they could talk in safety. “What do you think of that?”
“Anyhow,” said Beany, “they aren’t spies. I’m sort of fed up on spies. I can stand for most anything else.”
“No, they are not spies. I can’t make out just what their little game is. It’s important, though; you can see that. And we have got to stop it somehow.”
“That ought to be easy enough. Just go back and get the bunch and a few soldiers, and take ’em.”
“What’s the time, anyhow?” asked Porky He answered his own question by fishing his wrist watch out of his pocket. He had put it there for fear the luminous dial might be seen.
“Only eleven,” he said. “Plenty of time.” He sat staring into the darkness. There were very few flares now, although the night was usually kept bright with them.
“Wonder why that is,” Porky said.
“Something to do with our little mud house, don’t you think so?” said Beany.
“Yes, I do,” answered his brother. “I wish I could make it out. Give us time, give us time!”
“Well, come on! I want to get some one on the job,” said Beany. “I feel fidgety.”
“Sit still,” said Porky. “I want to think.”
“What you got in your head now?” said Beany. His voice sounded anxious.
“We are going to take those men prisoners with our own little wrenches and just by our two selves.”
“Three of them?” gasped Beany.
“Three of them!” said Porky. “Come on!”
CHAPTER VI
TAKING THREE PRISONERS
“Come nothing!” said Beany slangily. “You stay right here until we can talk this thing over, and make some sort of a plan. I don’t propose to go into something we can’t get out of.”
“Well,” said Porky, “the only plan I have is so crazy that I’m sort of afraid to tell you about it. But it would certainly be sort of nifty to take those men ourselves instead of running back to the bunch for help. It would kind of put a little gilt on things and would be something to tell Bill and Peggy about when they grow up a little.”
Beany was impressed. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “Looks like we haven’t much to tell them about, nothing but the submarine and the secret passage and that sort of thing.”
“And the spies back home,” added Porky. “No, we ought to wind up with something else. Beside, if I don’t get hold of a Hun or two after what we saw and heard back at the Duval farm, I don’t think I’ll ever live.”
“Well, I’m with you,” agreed Beany. “Now let’s plan. We sure have got to get a prisoner or two our own selves. What’s next?”
For twenty minutes the boys, heads close together, whispered rapidly. Then they rose and went noiselessly toward the false hillock.
The last hundred yards they crept, lying flat and motionless whenever a flare lit the sky. They were not frequent, however, and the boys made good progress. When they reached the mound, Porky, who was the best climber, crept to the top. He used the most infinite caution, and there was not a sound to betray his slow, sure progress. Gaining the top, he found what he had expected to find. A sodded opening, like a double trap door, operated from the inside, was slightly opened for air. So cleverly was it arranged with small bushes and grass growing on the trap doors, that it would have been impossible to detect it. Porky felt cautiously about the edges. Then he listened. From below came an unmistakable sound—the noise of
a couple of men snoring. The sound was so muffled by the thick steel walls, the earth and stones and sod outside them, that they were able to sleep without fear of detection. Porky shook his head admiringly. He was forced to acknowledge that the ingenuity of the foe seemed to know no bounds. Again he tried the trap doors. They were balanced to a hair and moved upward at his touch. He felt in his pocket, arranged something in either hand, then swung the doors both upward.
It would be untrue to say that a flash of doubt did not pass over the reckless boy at that instant. He thought of the General and of the way in which that great man trusted them to do their part in keeping out of trouble. He had surmised that there were three men below. There was room for a dozen. He had taken it for granted that he and Beany could pull off a stunt that instead might end in their immediate death or worse. But there he was, perched on the top, the heavy trap doors swinging wide, and below in the dense darkness the sound of men snoring. Porky took time to listen. There were snores from two, that was clear, and still another man talked and muttered fretfully in his sleep. Porky could hear no others.
He took a long breath, leaned over the opening, and turned a flashlight below.
As though electrified, three big men sat up and blinked in the glare of the flashlight.
Two of the men cried, “Kamarad!” and instantly held up their hands. The third said calmly, “Thank the Lord! I surrender!” and stood up.
“Not so fast!” said Porky in his deepest tones. He fiddled with the button on his flashlight. The light wavered. Porky kept his face to the men and called back over his shoulder:
“Sergeant, something’s wrong with my flash. Send up another!”
“Yes, sir!” answered Beany as gruffly as possible from below. He waited a moment, then scrambling up passed his flash to his brother. Porky put his in his pocket, and bent the light on the men below. An ax stood in one corner with a coil of rope. In another corner was a rough table loaded with strange instruments that Porky did not understand.
“Turn out your pockets!” he commanded, and three revolvers were tossed up, one after the other.
“See that rope?” demanded Porky, pointing his flash directly at the man who had spoken English. “You tell those other fellows to tie you up quick, and tell them to make a good job of it!”
“I surrender,” said the man Fritz. “Please don’t tie me up, sir!”
“You hear!” said Porky grimly. He called back over his shoulder. “Forward ten paces, Sergeant!”
“Yes, sir,” said Beany, and Porky almost giggled as he heard his brother scuffling violently around trying to sound like a squad. But he dared not look away from the men below, who were hastily tying up the man called Fritz. They did a good job, eager to make good with the unseen and most unexpected captors. If the officer above with the boyish voice wanted Fritz tied up, tied up he would be so he could not move. When they finished, the bulky form looked like a mummy.
“Is that a door in the side?” Porky demanded of Fritz.
“Yes, sir,” said Fritz.
Porky waited a little. The worst was coming now.
“Tell those men to open that door, and step outside, and if they value their lives, to keep their hands up.”
Fritz spoke rapidly in German. What he said was, “These are Americans, you fools! The officer says to step outside, and keep your hands up. You had better do it, if you want to live. They would rather shoot than eat. I know them! Obey, no matter what they tell you.”
When he had finished, one of the men, lowering one hand and keeping the other well up in the air, pressed a long lever and a narrow door opened, dislodging a little shower of stones and earth as it moved outward.
“Vorwarts zwei!” cried Porky, making a wild stab at German.
It was understood however. Fear makes men quick, and the two walked briskly out and stood side by side. One of them had stepped through a loop of the rope, and it came trailing after him.
“Tie those men’s hands and tie them together, Sergeant,” said Porky. He watched, cold with a fright he would never have felt for
himself, while Beany, keeping as much out of the light as possible, tied the men, and sawed off the end of the rope.
“Close the door!” demanded Porky.
Beany did so.
“Don’t leave me here, sir,” cried the man below suddenly. “If the Germans find that we have allowed this spot to be discovered, they will shoot me. If the enemy comes I shall be shot. I will come quietly. I am glad to surrender.”
“That’s all right,” growled Porky. “You are safe for a while. I am leaving a guard here. We want a few English-speaking prisoners, so you are quite safe for a while.”
“One of those men outside speaks English also,” cried Fritz.
“All right,” said Porky. “I advise you to keep still. Sergeant, detail a guard for this place with orders to shoot him at the first outcry.”
“Yes, sir,” said Beany. He retreated under cover of the darkness, thoughtfully going around the corner of the mound as a flare brightened the sky, and he remembered, in the nick of time, that it wouldn’t do to let the two men, carefully bound as they were, see him roaring directions at an imaginary squad. He returned in a minute and saluted, although his form was only a darker shadow in the darkness of the night.
Above, Porky closed the trap doors, and as he did so, cut the ropes by which they were opened and closed. Not even with his teeth could the trussed up prisoner below open them.
Beany had already shut the door in the side and wedged it with a broken piece of gun-carriage.
“Come with me, Sergeant,” said Porky, for the benefit of the English-speaking prisoner. “Vorwarts!”
It was a strange group that gave the password a half hour later and advanced to the General’s tent. The tent, hidden from observation by blankets and thick masses of boughs, was brightly lighted. General Pershing seemed to scorn sleep. Surrounded by his staff and a group of officers from the lines below, he sat puzzling over the reports they had made. Information was steadily leaking across. Every move they made was reported correctly. Only that very night as soon as it was definitely decided that no attack would be
made, the flares from the enemy’s lines almost ceased and their guns were silenced, as though they were glad to be assured of a few hours of peace. The positions of the American guns, no matter how cleverly camouflaged, were speedily discovered and gun fire trained on them.
The thing had assumed a very serious look. Losses were piling up. The General listened in worried and puzzled silence.
It was at this moment that the flap of the tent was suddenly opened, and two Germans, their hands tightly bound, stumbled blinkingly into the light. Behind them stood the two boys. There was a moment of surprised silence broken by the older prisoner, as he accustomed his eyes to the light. He glanced about the group, then his eyes rested curiously on his captors.
A look of fury and amazement crossed his face.
“Kinder, kleine kinder!” he muttered scornfully.
The other man was silent.
General Pershing gave a sigh.
“Those twins again!” he said. The boys saluted. “Where shall we leave these, sir?” said Porky respectfully. “We left another back there.” He waved into space. Back there might have been anywhere on the continent, as far as his direction showed. “It’s sort of a queer place, sir, and we would like some one to see it, because we can’t tell what it’s all for, and we don’t know that we could make the other fellow tell. He speaks English.”
Rapidly the General gave the necessary orders. The two men were led off a short distance and placed under close guard. An escort, with a couple of captains and an expert electrician, was named for the boys, and without a question from the General, who knew how to bide his time, the little party filed out of the tent and went back down the trail.
When they were out of hearing, the General laughed and spoke.
“I often wonder,” he said, “how those two boys pass the time in their own home. I don’t mind trying to run an army, but running those twins is a bigger task than I like to tackle. I am glad they don’t know just how glad I will be to hear the story they will tell us when they get the job finished. Three prisoners, and they want an escort of officers
and an electrician! Well, they are on the trail of something, I’ll be bound! I would like to question those prisoners but I won’t spoil the boys’ innocent pleasure in what they are doing. But I must say that I want one of you to keep an eye on them every second now until we return to headquarters. They are to be shipped home from there with a special passport, and I will be able to sleep better.”
“They came with General Bright, did they not?” asked a Captain.
“Yes, and when he was called to Paris, I foolishly offered to let them stay at headquarters. I thought they would play around and kill time until Bright came back. That’s what I get for overlooking their records. Things are bound to happen wherever they go.”
“All boys are like that more or less, but this is a lively pair,” said the Captain. “They seem to want to know everything. They are studying all my books on the French and English guns now, and I heard one of them say the other day that he had some good ideas on airplanes.”
“I hope he takes them home then,” said the General. “They are good youngsters, and I’ll be glad to get a receipt from their parents for them. They are perfectly obedient, and strict as any old regular about discipline, but no matter what good care we try to take of them, they are always getting into tight places.”
“Their coming over here seems a strange thing,” said one of the officers. “Sort of irregular.”
“There is a reason,” said the General. “They don’t know it themselves. They were sent across because it seemed a good thing to have a boy’s point of view for the boys over there of things over here. When I say they were sent, I do not mean that their expenses were paid. The Potters are amply able to spend money, but it was a good and patriotic thing for them to risk the lives of a fine pair like Porky and Beany I don’t even know their real names. Not that it matters. They would make themselves felt if they were called Percy and Willie. They are that sort.”
Talk drifted to other things and time passed until a stir and footsteps outside made it evident that the expedition had returned. The door flap opened and the party filed in, the remaining prisoner in their midst.
The General glanced at him, then bent a steady, steely look on the man’s face.
“You!” he said. “A German prisoner, you—”
The man’s face lighted.
He stood erect and made an effort to salute with his bound hands.
“Yes, sir,” he said in a low tone. “If I’m to be shot, sir, won’t you let me tell you how it all happened?”
The General glanced at his wrist watch.
“It is three o’clock,” he said. He nodded toward the sergeant. “Take this man in charge. To-morrow at seven o’clock bring him to my tent and I will talk with him.”
He turned away and did not glance again at the prisoner as he was led away.
“He knew you,” said a Captain.
“He worked for me four years on my apple ranch in Oregon. The foreman wrote me that he and seven others had left suddenly soon after the beginning of the war. I think we will get some very interesting information out of that young man. In the meantime,” he turned to the two boys standing as stiffly at attention as their fagged out bodies would permit, “in the meantime, boys, can you tell your little story in half an hour? It is very late, and we have a hard day before us to-morrow.”
“It won’t take that long,” said Porky. “We just went down a little ways, inside our own lines, General, so you wouldn’t worry, and Beany, he hears things just like a cat, and there was a little hill, with these men inside, and I climbed on top and talked to them through the trap door, and Beany made believe he was a squad.”
“And Porky had two of ’em tie up that Fritz fellow,” interrupted Beany, “and made ’em come out the door, and we just made ’em think the squad was guarding the hill, and we brought ’em up here, and they came too easy. And we didn’t try to carry arms, General, we just had a couple of monkey wrenches, and say, Porky, I’ve lost mine! That chauffeur will murder me!”
“A few details missing, however,” said the General. “However, that will do for to-night. In the morning, if you like, you may be present when I see the prisoner. Good-night!”
CHAPTER VII
THE PRISONER’S STORY
Some three minutes later (so the boys thought), some one shook them awake. It was morning.
“Six o’clock!” said their tormentor, prodding them viciously. It was the driver of their car. “Say, did youse have my monkey wrench?” he demanded of both boys.
“Sure!” said Porky quickly. “Here it is!” He handed out his wrench, while Beany tried to pretend to sleep again. The chauffeur looked it over.
“Naw, that ain’t me wrench,” he declared. “Same size and shape but it ain’t me wrench!”
“Why not?” asked Porky. “One of us took your wrench last night, and if this is the same size and shape, why isn’t it the same wrench?”
“Because it ain’t,” said the man. “That ain’t got the same feel as my wrench. You can’t wish off any strange wrench on this guy! I gotta have me own wrench! If General Pershing is goin’ to let youse kids go stealin’ wrenches, I’ll—I’ll—well, you’ll see what I’ll do, discipline ner no discipline!” He glared at the boys and at the unoffending wrench.
Beany sadly allowed himself to wake up.
“I had your old wrench,” he said, “and I guess I lost it. I will buy you a new one if I can’t find it.”
“You find it!” said the man. “I don’t want no new one! I know the feel of me own tools, and no others need apply!”
He went off grumbling, and the boys, now wide awake, watched him.
“I told you how it would be,” groaned Beany. “He’ll never let up on me. Wonder where I could have dropped it. In No-Man’s-Land probably, where it would be as easy to find as a needle in a
haystack, and where we can’t go anyhow, now it’s light. Look there! Oh praise be, I believe he has found it himself!”
It was so. The man suddenly pounced on an object lying on the ground, took it up, examined it with a tenderer care than would usually be bestowed on a tool, and with a scornful look turned and waved it at the watching boys. “Got it!” he called.
“Good!” said Beany affably.
“No thanks to you!” called the chauffeur. He stalked away.
“I would never let myself get so wrapped up in a little thing like that,” said Beany. He threw himself back on his bed.
“Don’t do that,” said Porky. “We are going to the General’s tent at seven, you know, to hear what the Fritz person is going to say for himself. I bet he tells the truth anyhow. If the General fixes his gimlet eye on him once, he will tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“I would in his place,” said Beany. “It wouldn’t seem just healthy to lie to the General.” He commenced the simple process of dressing as practiced by soldiers in the field. It consisted of very brief bathing in a couple of teacups of water in a collapsible, and usually collapsing washpan, made of canvas waterproofed, and after that the simple drawing on of breeches, canvas puttees and shirt. A soldier sleeps in his underwear, but sleeping in his outer garments is very strictly forbidden, no matter how cold the weather may be.
The boys reached the General’s tent at ten minutes to seven, and although they knew that the great man had been up for a couple of hours, they sat quietly outside until their watches told off the very tick of the expected hour. Then, just as they saw the guard bringing up the prisoner, they tapped on the tent flap, and at a word of summons entered.
The General, looking as though he had never stirred since the night before, sat in his accustomed place at the head of the table, over which a number of papers were strewn. He bade the boys good morning and nodded them to seats. In another moment the prisoner entered.
For a few moments the General took no notice of the man, keeping his eyes on his papers, while the fellow shifted uneasily from
one foot to the other
Then General Pershing looked up.
“Prisoner,” he said, “it is not customary to accord a prisoner of war the sort of interview I am about to give you, but the circumstances alter this case. I want the truth, and the whole truth.”
Porky and Beany nudged each other slyly.
“I want some of the information that it is in your power to give me, and I want it straight. You know you are in my power. There is always a firing squad for men like you. But I want you to unravel this puzzle. I want you to commence when you left the ranch—yes, even before that.”
The prisoner spoke eagerly. “I will tell you the truth, sir. I am glad to be here, no matter what you do to me. And I swear to tell you the truth.” He held up his right hand, and the boys saw it tremble. They commenced to believe him. It was evident that the General did, for he nodded and the man plunged into his story.
It held the boys breathless.
“There were eight of us working for you, General, before America went into this war. Eight men of German ancestry or birth. Most of them were naturalized, but one night a man came to my house and commanded me to meet him in a certain place. He was a German officer and of course I was curious to know what he wanted. When I arrived at the meeting place I found the others there. The officer, showing credentials of his rank that we could not doubt, told us that we were wanted as interpreters. Just that, General. He explained that Germany was obliged to use all the men within her borders as fighting men, and as they were most anxious to have no misunderstanding with America, they were picking a German born, or German bred man here and there as they could without rousing suspicion. They were taking them from the farms rather than from the cities. He said that several hundred would be needed. He assured us that education was not necessary. It sounded very plausible, General, and the salary we were promised was magnificent. We all bit, General, and he took us away that very night in a couple of automobiles.”
“The foreman told me,” said the General, “that you went away in the middle of the busy season without giving warning.”
“Yes, we did, General. I am sorry, and I was sorry then, but the pay—it was a great temptation. We have been punished since. We went down through Mexico and took ship. There were five hundred men on board who were all going over to be ‘interpreters.’ And we never guessed, poor fools, that ship after ship was bearing each a like load. We never suspicioned the outcome. When we reached German soil, we were scattered, two going one place, two another, and instead of having any interpreting to do, we were outfitted as soldiers and attached to different regiments. Men kept coming day after day. I dare not say how many thousands of Germans have been taken out of the United States in this way. We were virtually prisoners. Of course to the most of us it did not matter much. After all Germany was our fatherland before America adopted us. As long as we were fighting the French and English and the Russians, we did not care.
“But then, when we were already very tired, came the news that President Wilson had declared war.
“General, it is not yet believed in Germany. All of them, the highest officers, even the Emperor, on occasion, all have addressed the troops and have explained that war was declared solely for political purposes and that no troops were to be sent over sea.”
“They know now, do they not?” asked the General.
“Very few of them, General. They think that the English have adopted the American uniform as a blind.”
“What did you think, Fritz?” asked the General.
“I saw them fight, and I knew,” said Fritz simply. “I know them; I know how they fight. I told the others so. And when they came across the plain I wanted to hurrah. I suppose I will be shot as a German prisoner, but I could not help it. All my mistake was in the beginning. I would have deserted if I could have done so. Why, General, if those fellows over there behind the German lines knew the truth, a third of them would walk right over here. They are lied to again and again.”
“How is the army faring as regards food?” asked the General.
“There is not enough to feed a third of the men. All Germany is dying slowly of substitutes. Substitutes for bread, for meat, for tea, for sugar, for coffee, for milk. At first the army was fed well, at the expense of the civilians. Now all suffer together, and no man in the world works well or fights well on an empty and aching stomach.” He groaned.
“What were you doing out there in that hillock?” asked the General.
“We were well behind the German lines a few days ago,” said Fritz, “but whether they retired purposely or not, I cannot say. Since then, however, we have been kept there to communicate with the airplanes. It was possible to signal them by means of electric flashes down on the floor of our hiding place, through the open trap doors on top. Peter was in command. He took and sent the messages, and repeatedly he crept out in the night. I was never allowed to do anything, but if the Allies took the plain, and those ridges beyond it, Peter said we would all go out in American uniforms and learn what we could. We were expected to discover things too cleverly hidden from the airplanes.”
“This is interesting at least, Fritz,” said the General. “It would be still more interesting to know just how true it is that the German army in general does not know that we are seriously in the war. There are two millions of us here now, Fritz, and more coming.”
“Two millions!” echoed the astounded prisoner. “Two millions! When they learn that, the war is over. But how will they ever learn it? Your airplanes scattered leaflets along the front several times. Not where I was stationed, but I heard the order that any man who saw another stoop to pick up one of those leaflets, any man who was caught reading one was to be shot dead by the nearest soldier, who would receive the cross for doing it. I tell you, sir, they are doing everything they can to keep the army from learning that you are in the fight.”
“I wonder how true all this is,” mused the General.
Porky and Beany watched him narrowly. They were sure he had some plan, but it was clear that he wanted the prisoner to speak first.
“It is all true,” said Fritz. “General, won’t you let me earn my life, set me free for two hours—only that? And I will prove it to you.”
“You will disappear just as you did from the ranch, I suppose,” grated the General in a harsh voice. “Why should I give you any chance?”
“I don’t deserve it,” said the prisoner, “except that if my plan fails, I will certainly be shot by the Germans.”
“What do you propose?” asked the General.
“Two, perhaps three hours of freedom!” begged Fritz. “And if I can reach the German lines alive, I will return with twenty prisoners to prove to you that every man who is told that the Americans are here and are promised that they will not be shot, will follow me across.”
“They are having a skirmish now,” said the General, listening, “and a thunder storm is coming beside.” He was lost in thought. “Fritz, make good!” he said. “I release you. You are but one man, no loss to us, but you have told me a story of what amounts to kidnapping. I would like to know if this is true. Just one thing. Prove it to me by bringing twenty men back; but while you are there set the word free that the Americans have arrived. Two millions, remember, perhaps three.” He smiled. “And do not attempt to go or come until nightfall. I will remain here until midnight to-night. You are under guard until dark. You may go.” He rapped sharply on the table, the guards entered and removed the prisoner.
The General began to smoke.
“What do you think, boys? Will he come back?”
“Yes, sir,” said both boys together.
“Why?” asked the General.
“Why, he was telling the truth!” said Porky
“They don’t look like that other times,” said Beany. “He was straight, all right.”
“He will have to prove it,” said the General grimly. “Men who leave a job without warning, no matter what the needs of the situation, do not fill me with confidence.”
“I guess he is sorry now, anyway,” said tender-hearted Beany.
“We will hope so,” said the General. “Porky, you may typewrite these letters for me, and you, Beany, may check up these lists. If you
can do this properly, it will release a man for other duty.”
For two hours the two boys were too busy to know what went on in the tent. When the task was done the General dismissed them with strict orders that they were not to go more than thirty feet in any direction from his tent.
When the Germans had occupied that side of the valley, they had also used the hill as a temporary headquarters. Porky and Beany, like a pair of very restless and inquisitive hounds, went over the ground inch by inch. They could not help feeling that something good must be waiting for them within their screen of trees. The fighting miles away went on all day, and the time dragged for the boys until about three in the afternoon.
And then Porky found it—a tiny piece of wire sticking out of the ground under a root of the big tree under which they were sitting, feeling like a couple of prisoners themselves. They had never been on such close bounds before, and they didn’t like it.
Porky started to pull the wire, when Beany fell on him with a yell.
“A bomb!” he cried, flinging Porky on his back.
“My word! You have scared me to death anyhow,” said Porky.
Together they dug around the wire and followed it down and down until they almost gave up. At last, however, they had their reward, a square black tin box which they carried carefully to the General’s tent.
Even then the greatest care was taken in opening it, for fear of an infernal machine of some sort. It opened easily, however, and without harm and disclosed a mass of papers. So many that the German officer who had been in charge of them, fearing capture, had evidently buried them, thinking that with the turn of battle he could easily reclaim them from the earth.
Among the papers were several cypher keys, and one of them was found to fit the papers found by Beany in the oak table in the dungeon at the chateau back at headquarters.
Even the General was delighted, as a little study disclosed the most important plans of the coming campaign and a scheme for the expected drive, which now could be met point for point.
It was dusk before the General and his staff finished with an examination of the papers, fitting the new keys to the papers already in their possession.
Porky allowed himself to crow. “Guess we are sort of little old Handy-to-have-around!” he chortled. “Guess we get to go all the way with this distinguished mob!”
“Looks so,” said Beany, “but you never can tell.”
And they couldn’t.
CHAPTER VIII
ORDERS ARE ORDERS
Night fell dark and stormy. As soon as it was dusk Fritz begged to be released and, receiving the General’s permission, slipped away.
“I doubt if he comes back,” said the General, “but it will spread the news at least. No, it is too much to expect that a man will persuade a couple of men, to say nothing of twenty, to give themselves into the hands of an enemy they have been taught to believe is ruthless, but if he does, we will know that the conditions in the German army are worse than we dream.”
Time dragged away. The boys, still believing in Fritz, sat at the head of the only trail, watching. They almost wore their watches out looking at them, and trying them to see if they were wound. Time seemed to stand still and yet, somehow, ten o’clock came, and eleven and a quarter past. At half past the drivers prepared the cars for their silent night journey to the next sector. The tents were down, all but the screen of blankets behind which, with a closely shaded light, the General sat.
Ten minutes and the boys looked once more at the illuminated dials, and sighed.
“I’d have bet on that duck, if I was a betting man,” said Porky sadly. “I bet he meant to come.”
“Hark!” said Beany, listening.
Porky listened too. He could always hear what Beany heard, if Beany called his attention to it. A soft tramp of feet could be heard. The boys leaped to their feet. Tramp, tramp, scuffle, scuffle, up the hill in the darkness!
“They are coming!” gasped Beany. They were.
A flash of lightning preceding the storm that had hung off all day split the sky, and in its momentary glare the boys saw a small squad of American soldiers come out into the little clearing. The boys stood
